Lost Odyssey To Span Four DVDs

Perhaps proving that Sony has something to their 'bigger disc as standard' argument, IGN is reporting that Lost Odyssey will span multiple DVDs when it is released for the Xbox 360 next year. "Hot on the heels of the three DVD long Blue Dragon, Sakaguchi informed the crowd that Lost Odyssey will span a massive four DVDs. The game, which uses a mixture of CG and real-time cutscenes, will last roughly 40 to 50 hours. Lost Odyssey will follow in Blue Dragon's footsteps in another way as well. The team plans to ship the game with multiple language options, including English and Japanese. However, the voice animations will be synched to English on all versions, including the Japanese release."

Comments

Re:Fallacious argument

[Tinyn]

Ya, but PS3 shipped with a Bluray drive for games. Xbox360 has that HD-DVD video addon, but it can't do games. The point of 'Hrm, maybe the game drive use one of the new, bigger formats' is still true.

Re: Multiple discs didn't hurt FF VII...

[trdrstv]

Moving on to "the next disc" after 10-15 hours of play doesn't bother me. It worked for all the Final Fantasies of the PS1 era, so meh... whatever. What DOES bother me, is why are they STILL doing CG cutscenes? With the in game quality of Lost Odyssey, or any other "Current Gen game" why not use the in game engine to run them? It not only saves space, but makes the experience less jarring/ more immersive.

Re:Final Fantasy VIII all over again

[Stormwatch]

But if a game required constant switching back and forth between disks, that could get real annoying real fast.

One word for you: RIVEN.

Re: Multiple discs didn't hurt FF VII...

[ADRA]

FFVII was mostly linear in what it presented. The cut scenes included in each disc were arranged by timing of the event with some data spread over all the discs as needed. This is why (annoyingly) some event could only be triggered on a specific disc even through the area was open to you. If you ever wanted to develop a large sandbox type game with the same richness of content, there'd be no reasonable way of making the content fit.

The sad thing is developers know this and are most likely shearing the design of the game based on content size limitations.

Now before I get modded fan-boy, I don't have any Sony gaming products and I don't own any of their consoles.

Re:Holy crap!

[CastrTroy]

Is there 40 to 50 hours of gameplay? Or 40 to 50 hours of full motion video. I'm currently playing the GC version of Twilight Princess, and have played a total of 40 hours. And from what I can tell, I'm probably under 5 hours from beating the game. That's not counting doing all the side quests. I've completed a couple, but I haven't really focused on it. All that fits on a single GameCube Mini DVD. There's quite a few cutscenes, but I think they are all rendered with the game engine. If you have 40 to 50 hours of HD video, even compressed with h.264, I could see this filling up 4 DVDs. However, I could(n't) care less about how much full motion video there is in a game, I want lots of play time. I seem to remember FF VII taking 4 CDs and taking quite a while to beat, but that was more due to long cutscenes, and those 8 minute long attack sequences every time you attacked your enemy.